My understanding is that TPOT is just a group with similiar cultural sensibilities and references, senses of humor, political tolerations (if not political views), interests, etc, that agglomerated together on Twitter. One point of commonality that was found to be extremely widespread among them (though I don't think was explicitly foundational) was that, at some point in the past, most of them had dipped into the rat-o-sphere to widely varying degrees, to the point that "postrat" is an effectively equivalent term.
If you're trying to determine how close he is to culture where that kind of thing in general is common knowledge: even ignoring the high-tier practitioners he employs and presumably has reasonably technical discussions with, I've been reading his /with_replies on and off for a year and am reasonably confident he's been lurking around the "ML/eacc/doomer sim cluster" since at least December and probably before.
If you're trying to determine whether he is aware of that research specifically, I don't think it matters enough to modulate his reasonably well-evidenced sense of considerable AI-training worth in Twitter's content.
And whether or not the measures are being perfectly effective this early on is orthogonal to any explanation for taking them, whether token-hoarding or infrastructure-comeuppance.
Why don't you believe Musk knows or cares about that? There's extensive evidence that he's extremely AI pilled.
I haven't seen enough evidence or skepticism on display to fully buy into the Google Cloud claim (or any of the other just-desserts infrastructure stories), especially against the motivations and track records at play.
This seems to be the only source that ever reported anything about it:
Weekend scoop with @ZoeSchiffer for subscribers: Twitter is stiffing Google on its payments for Google Cloud, and significant parts of the company’s trust and safety infrastructure could collapse by the end of the month
How many tokens are in Twitter? How many new ones are generated per day? What proportion are they of humanity's total output? What are they worth?
Surely it's all about the site's contents as AI training data. This and the Reddit shit. It's silly to try to discuss this with that unmentioned or as an afterthought.
bro
10mo ago
I understand the impulse, but this is a sour grapes, "actually by losing we won" take.
This is a low-key minor disaster for everybody, the world is poorer, nobody wins, vs a world where this did not happen (or if it turns out to be "necessary", in a world where it was not "necessary").
But yes, if this holds, Twitter delenda est.
I tried to create an account from a datacenter IP, and I swear to god their "add the dice" captcha is just marking correct answers wrong no matter what in a loop just to fuck with, I guess, anyone trying to use twitter with that high a bad-actor heuristic.
I did it 9 times in a row to the point it backed me off to 20 captchas per attempt. I tried it slow, triple-checking everything, I tried it fast in case it was tripping on that, but nope: failed, do the whole thing again, over and over and over. Inhuman nightmare.
Can't wait until I'm browser-fingerprinted to a data-pooled ban from 15 years ago, and this experience is everything for me forever with no recourse.
Earlier today, all entries in accounts' /with_replies disappeared (though without the redirect to /home now happening for everything)
Nitter still works for the moment, though I can't imagine it will for long.
Is it just me, or did Twitter just completely nuke all content from being viewable without logging in?
New from today: "A response to the controversy about me"
The dynamics between Putin, Prigozhin, and Shoigu/Gerasimov make zero military sense.
But they make a great deal of sense from the perspective of regime preservation.
This is now the most logical frame through which to analyze the Ukraine War IMO.
I now think this is the likeliest scenario.
Putin wants to wind down the war, Shoigu/Gerasimov to be the scapegoats for Russia's territorial losses, and Wagnerites the enforcers against the Z extremists who don't get the memo in time.
Though he seems to be considering it more straightforwardly 3h later (not necessarily at odds with above)
Does he have an account here? @akarlin
RWA:
Option 1: It's a PsyOp to cover up a serious Russian offensive
Option 2: We're going to WW3 with NATO
Option 3: It's real & Putin is using Prigozhin to get rid of Shoigu
Option 4: It's real & Wagner has actually begun a coup d'etat
Option 5: It's behind-the-curtain negotiations & gets nipped in the bud before it escalates
Though of course this is only the dregs of pro-Russian commentary that makes it into english.
I'm sure there are people who unironically think that trans women are the ONLY women
Because they are among the only people in modern society who undertake a mortifying and harrowing coming of age ritual that ends with choosing a new identity and induction into a rarefied community, trans women are men and cis men are not.
Already some discussion on this topic happening over in the Small-Scale Questions thread
In the emerging Culture War aspect: it's interesting that the "50 year old" part is relatively much more operative than the "white guys" part than usual.
As long as you have backups and appropriate procedures for them, the use of commercial game controllers is not by itself a problem. There are several good reasons that serious (indoors) military hardware is starting to do this and even better reasons for any organization smaller than that to, vs trying to develop their own hardware which can be much more stupid and dangerous. It's similar to the reason why billionaires, princes and presidents all use the exact same iPhone you can buy at the drug store.
Potential problems around it are:
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Bluetooth. Insane.
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Passing it around in that insanely cramped space, both because it could be dropped (especially with those huge stick extensions), and in apparently giving control over to passengers (depends on particulars of their culture around this, but no clues are public that it was very good)
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No alternate backup control system. Uncertain that this is the case but looks likely. The problem here would not be not having something "more advanced", but rather not having something that's much simpler.
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... okay maybe there could conceivably be some issues about its functioning in weird atmospheric conditions, it really depends on the specifics which I don't know, maybe it's just perfectly normal surface temperature/pressure/humidity/composition and fine. But the problem wouldn't be that they used the controller, it would be whether and how they tested it.
Perhaps the most telling indication about any of this is the story of how they didn't discover some thrusters were installed in the wrong orientation until they were already down at the Titanic. With a culture like that, it’s possible that their fatal error was something more mundane than anyone is imagining.
(but it was probably just the hull)
A reddit user claims to have been involved in the project in an earlier stage, has been commenting frequently with novel information about it: https://old.reddit.com/user/cowpunk52
edit: another: https://old.reddit.com/user/vangro
I don't think the Titanic is in a trench. Though I'd also kinda dimly thought it was, probably just Mandela-Effect-style confusion with the Mariana Trench. From either half-remembered childhood Deep Ocean Facts, or their more recent James Cameron connection.
That PDF is 400 pages long and not text-searchable, but it's obvious from the order of magnitude that this must be something like "every recorded medical event in tens/hundreds of millions of people" and completely meaningless without comparison to base rates.
I found a YouTube channel collecting videos credibly claiming to be "CIA video briefings for Reagan"
They're mostly under 10 minutes long, and faithfully produced in the style of an 80s TV news segment.
What specifically is the case against Bellingcat?
I've seen a lot of nonspecific innuendo about them especially since Elon Musk's "psyop" accusations, but then what seems like one of their main guys volunteers this apparently unprompted (which is the first I've heard about it despite following the Belgorod raid all day, including through pro-Russian sources), which seems at odds with the idea that they're so tied up with western intelligence agencies.
in 2018, a K-pop group (that I had also never heard of before) sold 2.5 million tickets to a 7-city US/Canada tour.
For comparison:
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350k of those tickets were 2 shows in Texas, which has a total Korean population of 70k
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Taylor Swift sold 250k tickets to 3 shows in Texas 2 weeks later
The K-pop invasion of the west was suspiciously closely preceded by the height of popularity of the competitive SC2 scene, which was of course extremely heavily Korean, with the most prestigious tournaments being Korean productions in Korea often with a heavy K-pop presence (most prominently a song that goes "GG GG baby baby baby").
I think this is underexplored.
Very low-hanging fruit, but here are Ian Miles Cheong and Tim Pool beclowning themselves in the face of this, and Elon Musk getting real close to it.
I think it is a pretty big deal, certainly as far as half-pseudonymous internet communities go. Especially with its strong, early connections with AI development, as AI explodes in importance.
TPOT is the cool kids table at the cultural center of tech. Remember how much of the world was remade around the sensibilities of the kind of people who were early to computers and the internet.
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